Best Practices for Cloud Backups

Many vendors tout the purported advantages of cloud computing, which have increasingly been characterized by hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The increased adaptability, speed, and cost benefits of many cloud options, however, come with an unmistakable price: the issue of backups.

With ransomware and numerous other cyber security hazards threatening enterprises daily, backups have become an integral component for disaster recovery measures—particularly when they involve the cloud.

Nonetheless, as Retrospect General Manager JG Heithcock observed, “There’s a lot of solutions, of course, that are cloud only and the challenge is it’s really, really slow to move the data. If you’re trying to backup your client machine and you’re trying to send that up some place to the cloud, it’s going to take a long time.”

Consequently, it’s pivotal organizations observe a number of best practices for cloud data backups so they can benefit from this modern architecture while diminishing the risks associated with doing so. Measures involving local backups, email backups, and time reversal restoration options such as snapshots are an integral aspect of achieving this objective and conquering the challenges of cloud computing.

3-2-1 Local Although the cloud is almost universally renowned for its expedience of data access and availability, this boon doesn’t apply to the replication process essential for backing up cloud data. According to Heithcock, “Even if you’re doing diligent things like incremental backups and so forth, you still have to deal with that first hit, and it still [takes] long.” Many organizations routinely replicate data to the cloud for backups as part of disaster recovery methods. However, when those data originate in the cloud or are already located there, this practice forsakes the industry standard of utilizing three different backups (known as the 3-2-1 rule) for what Heithcock termed “a 2-1 solution.”

It’s far more preferable—and speedier—to start by backing up data “close by, whether it be local onsite or something that’s still got a very good bandwidth that you can restore from quickly,” Heithcock said. Options like backing up data to tape or disk still suffice in this regard. However, since the crux of the 3-2-1 approach is to have some data offsite as well, the cloud remains useful—especially when there’s backup solutions that can take the local copy “and still get two [more] copies out, because we’re just duplicating that data,” Heithcock added.

Time Reversal Backups Cyber security threats like ransomware are critical because of their temporal aspects. Dedicated backup solutions enable organizations to not only perform incremental backups, but also offer snapshots in which they can go back in time to different stages of their data or systems. This capacity is immensely useful for counteracting the effects of ransomware, which deliberately targets these systems when ransomware attacks “come in, they infect your stuff, but they don’t actually take effect,” Heithcock noted. “So everything’s still working, and yet it’s still encrypted. And then they come out and give you the thing that says you now need to pay us, and you can’t access your stuff.”

By deliberately waiting to inform organizations of encrypted files, attackers capitalize on the fact that conventional restoration points are likely recent and will revert to a point in which systems were already infected. However, methods like snapshots enable organizations to choose what point in time they want to restore their systems to, which would ideally be prior to infection. “For most people, in a disaster recovery kind of scenario, or even if you’re just trying to get back the spreadsheet you were working on before you accidentally erased it, you normally want the most recent version,” Heithcock remarked. “But with ransomware, that might not be the case.”

Email and Cloud MonitoringCompetitive backup platforms assist the backup process with cloud-based management features delivering various metrics about backups. Thus, organizations can access a web page to discern “what your storage is on each of these systems, and even drilldown and say okay, where’s my data being used up?” Heithcock revealed. “Am I looking good, am I starting to get over my limit? There’s the ability to groom a backup, but is that grooming policy working? Do I need to add more storage; do I need to filter out things; what do I need to do as far as management?”

Modern backup options even include specific features for backing up emails, which is a salient use case for cloud computing. The granularity at which such capabilities can both backup and restore emails is critical for marketing and sales verticals in which, as Heithcock denoted, “for a sales guy, his email’s his life blood. If he lost all his emails he might as well just leave and find some other place to work.”

Implementing Backups There are a number of distinct advantages to deploying the cloud for core business objectives. However, it’s necessary to augment these measures with the foregoing best practices in backups to maximize this technology. Relying on the concept of localized backups supporting three copies of data, time reversal backups, and backup monitoring and email backups, organizations can avoid numerous pitfalls while utilizing cloud architecture.

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